Irrigation system advice

Thanks StudH, good info. I'm reading your sites today.

I've found a source of PVC 40 on CL that claims to offer 1/2 price; a retiring plumber trying to clear his inventory. Most of it is 2" and under.

I went to the local irrigation supply house Friday. They were useless there and wouldn't answer questions. I didn't want them to design a system, but I did want to find out what options they offer in pipe and fittings and general costs for sch 40 vs 160, etc. Useless jerks.

Thats too bad. Maybe just try another shop? The ones around here are very helpful. Sometime those shops have two sides the public and contractors. The contractor side might be more helpful for you with that kind of project?

Be careful of the cheap pipe. If it looks like it has been stored out in the sun and the white pipe has a yellowish color to it I would pass. White PVC does not have UV stabilizers in it so it will degrade in the sun. But that can be a way to find cheap pipe and parts. I know even with the irrigation shops around here they will sell boxes of oldish dirty fittings for cheap. They come from a contractor that is going out of business or getting rid of inventory.

Well the cheap pipe is moot. Turns out it is a 180 mile round trip which adds $75 to my cost and he doesn't have enough inventory for it to still be cheap after that drive.

Unfortunately, I'm in a fairly small town and there isn't another irrigation supplier that I've been able to find. I might have to go back to them unless Home Depot and Lowe's have what I need.

DEKE, have you started work on your irrigation system?

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FWIW, as a reminder, it is COMMON for irrigation systems to be zoned so that smaller pumps and lines can supply adequate pressure. Our home in FL had three zones and was more than adequate. Also, agreement on white PVC - it MUST be protected from sunlight or it will fail. BTDT.

Here's a system you may want to think about incorporating. http://ag.arizona.edu/oals/ALN/aln46/lancaster.html

I've also seen a variation of this method. It's called 'continuous contour trenches'. Basically it's small trenches that follow the contour lines to capture the rain water and force it to seep into the ground instead of letting it run off the land. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGa85nM29es

I would go with drip irrigation and lots of mulch to reduce energy consumption.

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Kinda, sorta.

3 weeks ago, I knew I was leaving the farm in a week and would be gone for over 3 weeks. I had to set up something quick so that my neighbor could water my new plantings while I was gone. We filled 3000 gallons of tanks on the top of the slope and ran 300 ft of 2" sched 40 down the slope to a rudimentary distribution/drip system. Nothing is glued so the pipe can be reused elsewhere once a final design is determined.

That takes care of about 40 trees and for the other 40 trees we have to tote a 275 gal tote around on a truck and water from a 4 way hose. Fortunately, it has rained so much my neighbor has had to water only 2 times.

Had the well man out and he opened up an orange orchard well that was abandoned in 1983 - 85. He said the pipe was rust free. How can he determine that? I haven't been able to speak with him to find out. It is 200 ft from my future house (good) but about 1500 ft from the orchard (bad) and the fields I'll want to water. We determined that running 3 in pipe to the orchard will be cheaper than him digging a new well and powering it by solar.

The old well is over 300 ft deep (wellman ran out of string so he can't be sure), has a 5HP pump producing 50+ pounds of pressure and he has 2 choices of some sort of adapter that I don't understand that will make it produce 40 GPM or 90 GPM. Extension agent wants the 90GPM version for irrigation, the house builder wants 40GPM for the house. Either can be made to work for both applications, it is just a matter of costs which I have yet to determine.

The well ran 2 hours at 90GPM with no sign of exhaustion, which makes sense because that well irrigated 90+ acres of orange orchard and when it is freezing, they continuously spray the entire orchard to warm the trees and fruit.

I did get a lead on a irrigation consultant that will supposedly give me a couple of hours and talk me thru the big decisions, or many hours and design it down to an itemized parts list and scale drawings. Being out of the US and just getting I-net access today, I haven't been able to follow up any further.

I totally agree with the heavy mulch and drips. I'm using sheets of cardboard, many layers of newspaper, and a covering of wood chips to block weeds and help water retention.

Trenches are no good to me. I'm on sand with a natural state of .5% organic matter, and even during the heaviest downpour, there is no run off across the land, it all soaks thru the soil instantly. In the orchard where I have added 100 tons / acre of a combination of humanure/horse manure/ash/clay/peat/mulch, the water retention is much improved, OM measures 5%, but it still is not adequate to create trenches with flowing water.

I'm on almost pure sand too but during heavy rainfall the water does move across the surface as a sheet. The initial rain quickly soaks down into the soil but then it acts as a blockage and slows down the infiltration of the remaining rainfall causing the water to stay on the surface where it flows downhill. Our rain events are getting more intense and that is only going to make of the rain flow over the land instead of seeping into the ground like it does with a day long drizzle.

The trenches are not to create channels for the water to flow they are to capture the water and hold it until it seeps into the ground. That's why they follow the contour of the land. Think of them as long mini ponds.

__________________
"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?" Hobbs
"I'm not sure that man needs the help." Calvin

Fishhead, your trenches sound like what the Permaculture folks are doing. I've read some Perma books, watched Geoff Lawton's vids and even gone to Permies.com looking for advice for my sand situation and gotten nothing. I've yet to see a heavy enough rain that the water would run more than a few inches. And we can get some pretty heavy rains in Florida.

Still, I'm using contours and wood to somewhat terrace the slope my orchard is on. Maybe one day, with enough mulch and manure, I'll have real dirt that it will work to catch and direct rain.

That's not necessarily true. I have a 1 1/2" head pipe feeding 14 risers that feed rows of drip tubing that are 330 feet long each. Each emitter is about .92 GPH and are every 18 inches. These are pressure equalizing emitters.

Pump puts out 30 GPM at 42PSI. Oh, and that's off an 18 foot deep sandpoint well! But a fancy one. I drove 6 well points and plumbed them all together in an H pattern and made sure each point was at least 20 feet from any other point so that they didn't affect each other. I needed that many points to get the volume.

The well is almost 200 feet from the head of the irrigation system. 1 1/2" pipe all the way. The 30GPM is measured at the head not at the well.

I can run the whole system at one time. I installed 3 zones just in case running all that was too much but it runs the whole thing with no problems at all.

If you do the math, I'm probably getting closer to a 1/2 gallon per hour for each emitter and all that means is I'd have to run the system longer to get the desired amount of water in the ground. So its not that it can't be done. Its more of a factor of efficiency and how long you might need to let the pump run. My pump is wired for 220 so its more energy efficient than running it on 110v.

My controller can be set to run the whole thing at once or turn on individual zones. If I run one zone at a time then I would get the full almost-a-gallon per hour for each emitter.

I'm in sand so the 18" spacing was necessary to wet the whole grow zone because the water doesn't fan out very far from the drip point. In other kinds of soil, you could likely go every 2 feet.

Best price I found on the drip tubing was from http://www.berryhilldrip.com/home.php